[Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

Thu Feb 12 02:56:12 UTC 2004

User:Anthony DiPierro appears to be hell-bent to put the FDL to the test.  
He has created a complete fork of the English Wikipedia called "McFly":
http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/

None of the individual articles make any mention of Wikipedia nor of the  
FDL. Only the main page does, but not exactly in desirable form either. It  
does not link to Wikipedia, instead it contains the text:

"by Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber, Michael Hardy,
Vicki Rosenzweig, Anthony DiPierro, thousands of Wikipedians,
and various others worldwide"

And regarding the FDL:

Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version follows.]
Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document which  
are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the license  
status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!

To summarize
1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to Wikipedia  
or to its page histories
2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written by  
Anthony is licensed under the FDL.

We have to determine whether Wikipedia as a whole is "the document" or  
whether individual articles are. In my opinion, the English Wikipedia is  
no more a single document than the combined English and German Wikipedias  
are -- the English Wikipedia is an aggregation of separately FDL-licensed  
articles. This is clear because each document has a separate "history"  
section, a separate license footer, and most documents have different  
contributors.

Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation. If he refuses  
to make the necessary changes I strongly recommend taking legal action as  
otherwise this could easily become a precedent for third parties to use  
Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should probably send a  
warning letter anyway because of the "this license extends solely .."  
part.

The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without legal standing. I  
therefore would like to ask Alex in particular to take a look at this case  
and help in preparing the necessary letter.

When I temp-banned Anthony for vandalism a few days ago I knew that he was  
a troll. But this goes beyond simple trolling. Anthony's actions here  
could do serious long-term damage to our project, and we need to quickly  
respond.

Regards,

Erik